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Cognitive Development in Infancy
HOW SCIENTISTS KNOW
WHAT BABIES KNOW 123
PIAGET AND INFANT COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT 125Assimilation and AccommodationStage TheoryChallenges to Piaget
MENTAL REPRESENTATION
IN INFANCY 128CategorizingRememberingPlaying
INFANT “INTELLIGENCE” 133Infant TestsInfant Mental Development
in Social Context
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
IN INFANCY 138Language Norms and Methods
of StudyLanguage Comprehension
and ProductionIndividual Variation in Language
DevelopmentThe Building Blocks of LanguageMaking and Understanding
Sounds How Infants Learn WordsHow Infants Learn Grammar
SUMMING UP AND LOOKING
AHEAD 149
HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD
KNOW 150Did You Get It?Important Terms and Concepts
5CHAPTE
R
© George Doyle
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The baby being carried in the infant seat is not a passive voyager,
seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling. She must make sense of all of this input.
This is where cognitive development comes in. Just how does the infant make sense of
these sensations? How do we know what’s going on inside her head?
In this chapter, we’re going to review what developmental scientists have learned
about the mind of the infant in just the last 50 years or so. (Before then, whether babies
think, and what they thought, were the subjects of speculation.) The topics will include
Piaget’s views of cognitive development and some of the contributions of researchers
who came after Piaget and questioned his views. (Piaget was a major figure in the field,
and his writings energized the field of infant and child development. As often happens,
however, those who followed him modified or revolutionized his thinking. Because
he was so original, and his ideas formed a springboard to modern developments, we
spend a little time with Piaget, even though the field has passed his specific work.) We
then turn to cover mental representation in infancy, attempts to measure infant intel-
ligence, and the development of communication. We consider norms and individual
differences, how learning and cognition change over infancy, and how infants’ interac-
tions with objects and people influence their mental development—especially the abil-
ity to communicate with others. Equally important, we look at how researchers know
what infants think; after all, infants cannot tell us what’s on their mind.
HOW SCIENTISTS KNOW WHAT BABIES KNOW
How do researchers ask babies questions about what babies know, and how do ba-
bies answer them? Students of infancy have developed many different techniques and
strategies to ask babies questions. Two techniques are based on the concepts of habitu-ation and novelty responsiveness and use a similar approach. For example, a researcher
shows a baby a picture once, and the baby will look at it for a while. But if the baby is
shown the same picture over and over, the baby will look at it less and less. The first
time, the picture was novel and attention grabbing. However, like you would, babies
get “bored” with the same thing.
The baby’s getting bored is perfect for the researcher, because then the researcher
knows that the baby has developed some sort of mental representation of the picture—
otherwise, why should the baby look at the picture less the tenth time it is shown? The
loss of interest suggests that the baby recognizes the picture. Presumably, the baby is
comparing each new picture presentation with a developing memory of the picture
based on previous exposures. This process of getting to know about a stimulus is called
habituation. What happens if the researcher now shows the bored (habituated) baby
something new? If the baby looks more at a new picture than at the one she’s been
123
habituation The process in
which a baby compares each
new stimulus with a developing
memory of the stimulus based on
previous exposures, thus learning
about the stimulus.
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124 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
shown over and over—called novelty
r esponsiveness—that tells the researcher
that the baby not only recognizes the old
picture but also can tell the difference be-
tween the old one and the new one
(Bornstein & Colombo, 2010; Sirois &
Mareschal, 2002). Specifically, novelty re-
sponsiveness following habituation occurs
when a baby looks more at a new stimulus
than at a familiar one.
Using habituation and novelty respon-
siveness, researchers can ask a variety of
“yes-no” questions of babies. For exam-
ple, can babies tell the difference between
a smiling and a frowning face? To do your
own experiment, get two pictures, prefer-
ably of the same person: one happy and
another frowning. Show one to the baby
until he or she stops looking, then show
the two pictures together. If the baby looks
longer at the novel facial expression, then
he is telling you that he can tell the differ-
ence between smiling and frowning. How good is a baby’s memory? By habituating
(familiarizing) infants with a picture and testing them later with the same picture, it is
also possible to study memory. (If the baby acts as if the picture is new, he obviously
doesn’t remember it.)
A third approach to infant perception and cognition involves learning. Again, try
your own experiment. Put a baby in a crib with a mobile hanging overhead. Now,
take a baseline reading of how often she kicks. Then attach the mobile by a ribbon
to the baby’s ankle so that, when the baby kicks, the mobile jangles. Babies quickly
learn that their kicking moves the mobile. When attached to the mobile in this way,
most babies kick at two to three times their baseline rate. Suppose now that you
wait a day or two and then retest the baby. When an infant who has previously
learned the association between kicking and mobile-moving relearns that association
more rapidly than he or she did the first time, this tells us that the baby remembers
(Rovee-Collier & Barr, 2001).
One of the ways developmental researchers test infants is by showing them stimuli and noting infants’ reactions, like this 8-month-old baby boy looking at an image on a computer screen.
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I NT E R I M S U M M A RY 5.1How Scientists Know What Babies Know
Four Different Approaches Used to Learn About Infant Perception and Cognition
1. Habituation—occurs when a baby compares each new stimulus with a developing memory of the same stimulus shown on previous exposures.
2. Novelty responsiveness—happens after habituation; if a baby looks more at a new stimulus than at the one shown repeatedly, the baby not only recognizes the old stimulus but also can tell the difference between the old and new.
3. Learning—an example is putting a baby in a crib with a mobile and taking a baseline reading of how often she kicks. Then conditions are changed, responses noted, and the baby is retested, which tells us about infant learning and memory.
4. Imitation—babies are shown a sequence of events and observed to see if they imitate the sequence.
novelty responsiveness Fol-
lowing habituation, the process in
which a baby looks more at a new
stimulus than at a familiar one.
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Finally, scientists use a fourth approach to study what
babies know by showing them a sequence of events and
seeing whether they imitate the sequence. Consider this
scenario. You are seated across the table from an older in-
fant. You have a spoon, a small red box, and a larger blue
box. While the baby is watching, you place the spoon in-
side the red box, and then place the red box inside the blue
one. Then, you disassemble it all and do it again. Now, you
give the baby the three objects. If the infant does exactly
what you did, in the same order, this tells us she is able to
observe and remember a sequence of events (Barr &
Hayne, 2000).
Each of these ways of studying development has been
used with the littlest infants. If you were to do some or all of
these things with an infant you know, you’d rediscover
what developmental scientists in the last half century have
discovered. Although it might not always be apparent, in-
fants have an active mental life. They are constantly learn-
ing, developing, and even testing—yes, testing—new ideas.
(For a summary of this section, see “Interim Summary 5.1:
How Scientists Know What Babies Know.”)
PIAGET AND INFANT COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Between 1925 and 1932, the Swiss biologist and philosopher
Jean Piaget watched closely as his own three children—
Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent—developed from infancy, noting the enormous in-
tellectual progress each made during the first two years of life. Soon afterward, Piaget
(1936/1952) published the Origins of Intelligence in Children, a collection of his observa-
tions and informal experiments that led to a revolutionary theory of cognitive devel-
opment in infancy (Brainerd, 1996; Bremner, 2001; Lourenco, 1996).
Piaget suggested that each infant constructs an understanding of the world—
including space, time, causality, and substance—on the basis of his or her own ac-
tions in the world. At the time, other developmental scientists viewed children as
well-equipped, but basically passive, recipients of information from the environment.
Piaget did not think that knowledge derives from sensations or perceptions, or from in-
formation provided by others. Rather, Piaget wrote that infants actively construct what
they know. This basic notion has shaped the study of infant cognition ever since.
What does it mean to “actively construct” knowledge? Imagine that you and
a friend have driven to a new restaurant in a neighboring town. A month later, you
want to eat there again, so you decide to drive back. If you were the driver the first
time, you’ll have an easier time remembering how to go than if you had been the
passenger—because you actively constructed your knowledge of how to get there
by doing the driving. Recall the kitten study conducted by Richard Held and Alan
Hein (1963), which was discussed in Chapter 4. This study demonstrated the critical
importance of self-produced activity for understanding the environment. The kittens
that were allowed to move about on their own avoided the deep side of a visual cliff,
stretched out their paws appropriately in preparation for contact with a solid surface,
and blinked at approaching objects. By contrast, even after extensive transportation
in the gondola, the passive cats failed to show such spatially sensitive behavior. To
Piaget, an infant is the driver (not the passenger) in cognitive development; the active
(not the passive) kitten.
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This baby is lying in a crib with a ribbon connecting his ankle to the mobile overhead so that when he kicks, the mobile jangles. In this way it is possible to study how infants react when they can control their environment.
Piaget and Infant Cognitive Development 125
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126 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
Assimilation and AccommodationTo explain cognitive development, Piaget detailed the process of adaptation.
Adaptation, in Piaget’s theory, is the process whereby knowledge is altered
by experience. Adaptation itself involves two complementary, interwined,
and powerful processes: assimilation and accommodation. When infor-
mation can be processed according to what the child already knows, the
information is said to be assimilated. A child who understands that when
she drops a rattle off her high chair, the toy falls downward onto the floor
will easily understand that when she drops her Cheerios®, they do the same
thing; that is, she can assimilate this new knowledge. At times, the child’s un-
derstanding of the world does not permit assimilating new information. What
happens when the child lets go of a balloon filled with helium? It goes up,
not down. This violates the child’s understanding of the world (because until
then, everything that was dropped followed the same pattern). When new
information cannot be assimilated into the child’s existing understanding,
two things can happen. One is that the child fails to assimilate and simply
moves on to another activity. Alternatively, the child changes his or her un-
derstanding to permit new information to be processed. The modification of
existing understanding to better accord with reality is termed accom-modation; that is, children actively change so that they can under-
stand the environment better. Following the experience with the
helium balloon, the child understands that some objects rise or
float and not all objects fall when released; through the process of
accommodation, the baby has developed a new way of thinking.
Assimilation and accommodation are not separate processes, but alternatively occur
so that the child’s understanding can match reality. In assimilation, children use their
existing understanding to make sense of the world. In accommodation, they modify
their understanding to appreciate reality better and better.
Stage TheoryPerhaps the best-known feature of Piaget’s theory is his stages of cognitive development.
Piaget held that mental development unfolds in a fixed sequence of developmental
steps. As a whole, the sensorimotor period occurs during infancy; it is followed, in
Piaget’s theory, by the preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational peri-
ods of childhood, preadolescence, and adolescence, respectively (discussed in the chap-
ters on physical development in early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence).
During the sensorimotor period, “thinking” consists of putting sensory information with
motor activity. According to Pia get, infants learn through actions: looking, listening,
touching, sucking, mouthing, and grasping. Within the sensorimotor period in infancy,
Piaget proposed a sequence of six stages (see Table 5.1). The child’s current stage defines
the way the child views the world and processes information in it.
One more accomplishment during the sensorimotor period is learning that certain
actions produce certain results (causality). For example, banging a spoon on a high-
chair tray produces a loud noise, attracts attention, and may bring dinner. Another
major advance is object permanence. In early infancy, “out of sight is out of mind”—
literally. The baby’s world consists of what he or she can perceive in the here-and-now.
If you give a 3-month-old an interesting toy, his attention perks up. But if you cover
the toy with a cloth, he doesn’t look for it; rather, he behaves as if the toy no longer ex-
ists. By 8 or 10 months, the infant is surprised when the toy disappears, and he searches
for it. The infant realizes that something out of sight still exists (Bogartz, Shinskey, &
Schilling, 2000; Krojgaard, 2003; Mash, Arterberry, & Bornstein, 2007; Xu, 2003). For
Piaget, object permanence was a first step toward mental representation: No longer
To actively learn about their world, babies grasp, touch, and mouth objects just as this 9-month-old girl is doing.
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adaptation The process
whereby knowledge is altered by
experience. Adaptation
involves two complementary
processes: assimilation
and accommodation.
assimilation The process by
which information can be incor-
porated according to what the
infant already knows. Assimilation
allows the infant to use existing
understanding to make sense of
the world.
accommodation The process
by which the infant changes to
reach new understanding; that is,
the modification of existing under-
standing to make it apply to a new
situation. Accommodation allows
the infant to understand reality bet-
ter and better.
sensorimotor period A devel-
opmental time, consisting of a
six-stage sequence, when thinking
consists of coordinating sensory
information with motor activity.
object permanence The
understanding that an object
continues to exist even when it
cannot be sensed.
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dependent on immediate sensory data, the infant has images or thoughts of objects
(including people) in mind when the object (or person) is not physically present. Piaget
believed that mental representation did not develop until the end of the sensorimotor
period.
Challenges to PiagetAlthough Piaget’s view of infant cognition has been extremely influential, many of his
claims about infant development have been challenged by empirical research. In gen-
eral, it seems that Piaget underestimated what infants know at different ages.
One major criticism, for instance, is that Piaget focused on the ways that infants
learn through movement (i.e., the “motor” in sensorimotor) and ignored other ways
in which infants learn. For example, one study showed that limbless children (whose
mothers took the sedative thalidomide during the first trimester of pregnancy) devel-
oped a normal cognitive life despite the absence of normal sensorimotor experience in
infancy (Décarie & Ricard, 1996). This suggests that Piaget overestimated the impor-
tance of active (mobile and tactile) exploration—and underestimated other sensory
and organizational capacities of infants. Babies make a lot of sense of the world by
looking and listening without physically manipulating things.
Other research shows that object permanence and the capacity for mental represen-
tation of the physical world (i.e., the ability to hold an image or thought of something
in the mind) appear much earlier in development than Piaget supposed (Baillargeon,
2004). Indeed, infants can imitate some behaviors they see (for example, sticking out
their tongue) soon after they are born, which says that they have some capacity to rep-
resent the external world at birth (Meltzoff & Moore, 1999).
Not only can infants imitate another person within the first months of life, as early
as 6 months of age they can imitate a model’s novel actions after a delay. For example,
in one experiment, 6- to 9-month-old infants observed an adult model lean forward and
Piaget and Infant Cognitive Development 127
Stage 1 Birth to 1 month Infants do not accommodate, so mental They cannot recognize that stimuli belong to solid development is minimal. Everything is objects in the outside world—for instance, that assimilated into their existing understanding sounds come from other things. and very slowly.
Stage 2 1 to 4 months Infants coordinate different aspects of They coordinate hand and mouth (deliberately their understanding of the world. putting their fingers in their mouth).
Stage 3 4 to 7 months Infants are aware of relations between When infants accidentally produce environmental their own behavior and the environment. events—kicking the side of the crib shakes the
mobile that is attached to the railing, for instance—they may repeat them, suggesting that they want to review their effects on the environment.
Stage 4 7 to 10 months Infants construct relations among They coordinate a face and a voice as being from environmental stimuli. the same source.
Stage 5 10 to 18 months Infants accommodate to the outside world They attempt to see whether milk leaks out of and discover many unexpected relations a bottle at different rates depending on the among objects. angle of the bottle and the force with which it
is squeezed.
Stage 6 18 to 24 months Infants now can form a mental When a ball rolls under a sofa, for example, a representation; for example, imagining child will move around the sofa and anticipate the whereabouts of an invisible object. the reemergence of the ball.
TA B L E 5 . 1 Stages of the Sensorimotor Period of Infancy
Stage Approximate Age What the Baby Can and Cannot Do Example
mental representation The
ability to hold in the mind an
image of objects (and people) that
are not physically present.
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128 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
press a panel with his forehead (a highly unusual, novel behavior) (Meltzoff, 1988). One
week later, the infants who had viewed this behavior, and a control group of infants
who had not, returned to the laboratory and were put in front of the panel. Infants who
had not seen the experimenter never pressed their foreheads to the panel, whereas two-
thirds of the infants who had previously witnessed this behavior did. So not only were
babies able to imitate what they had seen, they were able to do so from memory!
Developmental scientists now agree that Piaget seriously underestimated infants’
perceptual and cognitive capacities (Birney et al., 2005; Keil, 2006). Infants’ compe-
tencies in understanding sequences of events, means-ends relations, space, causality,
and number are all in evidence much earlier in development than Piaget predicted. In-
fants are more organized and sophisticated cognitively than Piaget thought. Neverthe-
less, his contributions—especially his beliefs that infants are active learners and that
infants think, although differently from older children and adults—laid the foundation
for the study of infant cognition today. (For a summary of this section, see “Interim
Summary 5.2: Piaget and Infant Cognitive Development.”)
MENTAL REPRESENTATION IN INFANCY
Piaget was interested in the broad picture—in the overarching features of cognitive
development from birth through adolescence. Other developmentalists concentrate on
specific elements of cognitive development—on what skills infants acquire and when.
Students of infant cognition are particularly interested in categorization, memory, and
pretend play. One reason is because each of these developments is related to repre-
sentational thinking—the ability to think about objects and people that are not pres-
ent. Piaget thought that this breakthrough did not occur until 18 to 24 months. Using
different investigative techniques, though, contemporary researchers have found evi-
dence of representational thinking at considerably younger ages.
I NT E R I M S U M M A RY 5.2Piaget and Infant Cognitive Development
Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist and philosopher who laid the foundation for the study of infant cognition today.
He believed that mental development unfolds in a fixed sequence of developmental stages. The sensorimotor period encompasses infancy.
Developmental scientists now agree that Piaget underestimated infants’ perceptual and cognitive capacities.
Piaget’s theory
■ He believed children actively con-struct what they know on the basis of their own motor activity and inter-actions in the world.
■ He believed adaptation is the process whereby knowledge is altered by experience.
■ It involves assimilation (using existing understanding) and accommodation (modifying understanding).
■ Advances in the sensorimotor period include causality (certain actions produce certain results) and object permanence (the understanding that an object continues to exist even though it cannot be sensed).
■ Object permanence paves the way tomental representation (infants can hold in their mind images of objects and people that are not physically present).
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CategorizingImagine going to a grocery store in which there is no rhyme or reason to the way that
products are arranged. Chicken breasts are placed next to trash bags, which are along-
side cream cheese. Chicken drumsticks are on the same shelf as toothpaste, which is
right below the tangerines. What a nightmare shopping would be! Thankfully, though,
grocery stores group similar or related objects near one another—into categories (poul-
try, cleaning supplies, dental products, fruits).
Categorization involves grouping separate items into a set according to some rule.
A Ford, a Toyota, and a Mercedes-Benz are all cars. Oaks, elms, and pines are all trees.
Sipping, slurping, and guzzling are all ways of consuming liquids. To better organize
our experiences, we frequently treat different objects or events as similar; that is, we
categorize. So do infants.
Categorization is important for a variety of reasons. It helps to simplify and order
the infant’s world in three ways (Bornstein, 1984). First, the infant comes to under-
stand that his brown teddy bear is the same teddy bear in the light and in the dark,
when it is nearby and faraway, and so on. The environment into which infants are
born, and in which they develop, is constantly changing, producing an infinite variety
of sensations. Moreover, infants experience the world in biological states that are fre-
quently changing (e.g., from being drowsy to being awake). Categorization structures
and clarifies perception.
Second, the infant doesn’t have to remember every single aspect of every single
object, such as every one of his or her mother’s facial expressions to recognize her
face. Categorization facilitates the storage and retrieval of information. It supplies a
principle of organization that allows more information to be stored in one “file” for
mother, rather than multiple files.
Third, the infant’s learning that her family’s dog barks can be applied to other dogs
as well. With categorization, knowledge of an attribute of one member of a category
provides information about other members of the same category. And new observa-
tions (dogs also have tails) can be added to the category and automatically applied to
other members of the category.
Evidence that infants categorize comes from habituation and novelty responsive-
ness tasks. In the habituation/novelty responsiveness paradigm, infants are first fa-
miliarized with several examples from the same category (say, several cats) and are
then presented with a novel example from the same category (a new cat) and with a
novel example from a different category (a dog). We know infants categorize because
they pay more attention to a novel out-of-category dog than to a novel in-category cat;
that is, they treat one novel stimulus as familiar and another novel stimulus as new.
To understand this concept, try this: Habituate a baby to pictures of a horse, a cow,
and a cat. Then show the baby either a dog or a rocking chair. The baby will tend to
look longer at the picture of the rocking chair because it is not an animal (Arterberry &
Bornstein, 2001, 2002).
Studies of the way children play with objects from similar and different catego-
ries also show that categorization abilities progress during the first 3 years. Here’s
how it’s done: Give a child eight small three-dimensional models (see Figure 5.1), four
each belonging to two categories, say, animals (cow, dog, goose, and walrus) and ve-
hicles (train, bus, motorbike, and all-terrain vehicle), and encourage the child to play
with them. Close analysis in such studies reveals that children touch objects within a
category one after the other more frequently (at greater than chance levels) than ob-
jects across categories. That is, in the preceding example, the baby plays with animals
and then with the vehicles but does not mix both together. Categories also function
at different levels of inclusiveness, and understanding how children use them tells
us how children mentally represent information (Rakison & Oakes, 2003). By 1 year,
children show that they have a grasp (so to speak!) of the most inclusive categories
categorization A process that
involves grouping separate items
into a set according to some rule.
Mental Representation in Infancy 129
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130 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
infantile amnesia The adult
recollection of almost nothing of
events that took place before the
age of 3 or 4.
(e.g., animals vs. vehicles), but children have to be 1½ years old to recognize less inclu-
sive categories (e.g., dogs vs. cats) and almost three to tell the least inclusive categories
apart (e.g., two different kinds of cats).
RememberingIt is obviously important that infants attend to stimuli and events in their environ-
ment. But it is also crucial that they be able to store, retrieve, and use that information
later. Memory representations underlie the child’s awareness, experience, knowledge,
and interpretation of the world.
For years, people believed that infants could not remember much of anything. You
probably don’t remember much of events that took place before you were 3 or 4 (see
Bornstein, Arterberry, & Mash, 2004). Indeed, Sigmund Freud (1916/1917, 1966) coined
the term infantile amnesia to describe this phenomenon, which he attributed to re-
pression (excluding ideas from consciousness or holding them in the unconscious) of
memories of traumatic events. Piaget (1954) also believed that memories may not be
possible during the first year because infants do not have the capacity to encode in-
formation symbolically. We now know that this view is inaccurate. It is true that most
adults may not be able to recall things from their first two or so years of life. But research
shows that infants can remember previously experienced events. Whether adults accu-
rately remember their infant experiences, and whether infants remember things from
their very short past, are two different questions, with two different answers.
Categorization AbilitiesTo understand infants’ categories of objects, researchers present them with plastic models—for example, four animals and four vehicles—and then analyze infants’ patterns of holding and looking at the two groupings.
FIGURE 5.1
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Human infant memory has been studied using many techniques. By habituating
(familiarizing) infants with stimuli and testing them immediately afterward with the
same stimulus, we can study short-term memory (i.e., see whether infants can tell the
difference between something they’ve been shown and something new right away).
Imposing a delay between habituation and a later test allows us to assess long-term memory. By varying the amount of delay between habituation and the subsequent test,
it is possible to study the accuracy of infants’ memory over different time intervals and
to see if this changes with age. We can also vary how long the initial period of familiar-
ization is to see if there are changes with age in how much an infant must be exposed
to something (study time) to remember it.
Research shows that infants’ ability to remember clearly improves with age. In-
fants habituate more quickly and more efficiently as they grow older. They also re-
member more information, across longer periods of time, as they get older and with
helpful reminders (Hsu & Rovee-Collier, 2006; Sheffield & Hudson, 2006). Deferred
imitation—showing children a series of actions, then seeing whether they repro-
duce these actions later—is even more advanced. One team of researchers used three
events—pulling a mitten off a puppet’s hand, shaking the mitten, and then putting
the mitten back on the puppet’s hand (Barr & Hayne, 2000). They found that re-
call of these actions after a 24-hour delay was lowest among 6-month-olds (who did
not perform any better than infants who never observed the modeled sequence),
intermediate among 12-month-olds, and highest among 18- and 24-month-olds. Ba-
bies did not require extremely long exposures to demonstrate short-term memory.
In sum, as children grow they demonstrate an ability to hold events in memory for
longer time spans, and they require fewer cues and shorter periods of familiarization
to recall past events.
The study of very long-term memory in human infants poses challenges for an-
other reason—you need to wait a long time for them to grow up! This is one of the
reasons that some developmental scientists interested in early memory have turned
to animals, like rats, whose lifecycles are substantially shorter. In one animal experi-
ment, infant rats were stressed—they were deprived of nesting materials—and their
ability to remember location and recognize objects was subsequently tested. In their
young adulthood, memory was unaffected; by middle age, however, memory defi-
cits appeared, and the deficits progressively worsened compared to unstressed rats
(Brunson, Kramár, Lin, Chen, Colgin, Yanagihara, & Baram, 2006). Electrical activity
in brain cells in stressed rats was adversely affected too. The suspicion is that, in
human infants, stress caused by parental loss or abuse or neglect might likewise un-
dermine long-term memory.
Playing Play is fun and interactive, but also involves mental work—studying a doll, manip-
ulating a busy box, building with a set of blocks, or interacting with an imaginary
playmate at a make-believe tea party. Play frequently imitates life, and it is quite com-
mon to observe children reenacting in play specific events that they observed or par-
ticipated in routinely (e.g., “driving” a toy car). Such behavior indicates that young
children represent events mentally well enough to reproduce them.
Piaget proposed that play increases in sophistication as children mature, and that
infants progress from exploratory play to symbolic, or pretend, play. In the first year,
play is predominantly characterized by sensorimotor manipulation; infants’ play ap-
pears designed to extract information about objects—what objects do, what perceivable
qualities they have, and what immediate effects they can produce. This is commonly
referred to as exploratory play because children’s play activities are tied to the tan-
gible properties of objects.
deferred imitation Reproduc-
ing a series of actions seen at an
earlier time.
Mental Representation in Infancy 131
exploratory play Children’s
play in which activities are tied to
the tangible properties of objects.
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132 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
In the second year, children’s play takes on a new quality: The cog-
nitive goal of play now appears to be symbolic. In symbolic play,
children enact activities performed by the self, others, and objects in
simple make-believe scenarios, pretending to drink from empty
teacups, to talk on toy telephones (as in Figure 5.2), and the like.
Most children pass through these two broad stages of play, but
children of a given age vary greatly. On average, 15 percent of 1-year-
olds’ total play is symbolic. However, some 1-year-olds never exhibit
symbolic play, whereas others spend as much as 50 percent of their
time in symbolic play. At 2 years, 33 percent of toddlers’ total play is
symbolic on average. For some individual children as little as 2 per-
cent is symbolic, whereas for others 80 percent is symbolic. (Elaborate
pretend play such as dramatic sequences is typically not seen until
early childhood, and is discussed in Chapter 7).
Play normally occurs in the context of social interaction. Children
may initiate play, but adults influence its development by outfitting
the play environment, engaging children actively, and responding to
their overtures. How does adult social interaction affect play? When
interacting with their mother, children’s play is more sophisticated,
complex, and varied than is their solitary play (Bornstein, 2007). In a
longitudinal study of mother-child play interaction, researchers found
that, when mothers responded to their 18-month-olds’ object play in an
“options-promoting” manner (i.e., encouraging, affirming, and/or ex-
panding on the child’s activities), the children engaged in higher levels
of symbolic play at 40 months of age than did children whose moth-
ers responded in an “options-limiting” manner (i.e., disapproving of or
obstructing the child’s play) (Stilson & Harding, 1997).
In some cultures, infant play is viewed as predominantly a
child’s activity (e.g., in Mayan and many American Indian cultures), whereas other
cultures assign an important role to parents as play partners (e.g., in middle-income
U.S. culture). Differences between cultures also exist in views about the value of play
(Gönçü & Gaskins, 2007). Some cultures believe that play provides important develop-
ment-promoting experiences; others see play primarily to amuse. Presumably, cultural
beliefs about play affect the nature and frequency of children’s play with parents, sib-
lings, and peers.
Generally speaking, Japanese children and mothers tend to engage in more symbolic
play than their U.S. counterparts, whereas U.S. children and mothers tend to engage in
more exploratory play (Bornstein, 2007). In line with other social features of the culture,
Japanese mothers organize infant-directed pretend play in ways that incorporate a part-
ner into play. Japanese mothers encourage interactive (other-directed) activities (e.g.,
“Feed the dolly”), whereas U.S. mothers encourage self-exploration that is more func-
tional (“Push the bus”). For Americans, play and toys are frequently the focus or object
of communication. In contrast, for Japanese, the play setting and associated toys are
used to promote mother-infant communication and interaction. This difference is consis-
tent with cultural child-rearing practices more generally, which in Japan emphasize
closeness and interdependency between people, and in the United States encourage in-
terest in objects, interpersonal independence, and the acquisition of information.
In summary, infants’ categorization, memory, and play reflect mental representation as
well as broader cultural themes and values. These abilities do not develop in isolation;
indeed, they are fostered during social interactions with parents when parents are at-
tuned to their child’s emotional cues and developmental level. (For a summary of this
section, see “Interim Summary 5.3: Mental Representation in Infancy.”)
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Symbolic PlayHere’s a 15-month-old girl pretending to talk on a tele-phone . . . just like mommy.
FIGURE 5.2
symbolic play Children’s
play that enacts activities
performed by the self, others,
and objects in pretend or make-
believe scenarios.
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INFANT “INTELLIGENCE”
Developmental scientists are also interested in how much children of a given age
understand, and how much children of the same age vary in their “intelligence”—
a quantitative approach to cognitive development (Siegler, 2002, 2007).
Infant TestsBeginning in the 1920s, about the same time that Piaget began making notes on his
own children’s cognitive development, Nancy Bayley set out to measure mental and
motor growth in infancy. She developed a scale of the performance of middle-income
children, and they were tested regularly from birth through 18 years. The Bayley Scales
of Infant Development have become the most widely used assessments of infant and
early childhood development. Today, there are two scales: a Mental Development
Index and a Psychomotor Development Index. They assess motor, sensation, percep-
tion, cognition, memory, language, and social behavior in infants and toddlers over
the first years of life.
Measuring infant intelligence is challenging. If you wanted to assess the usefulness
of an IQ measure, say, among college students, you might ask how well IQ scores tell
you about performance on another index of intelligence, like achievement in school.
From preschoolers to adults, standardized tests are appropriate (Lichtenberger, 2005),
and there is modest agreement between IQ scores and other measures of intelligence.
The degree to which a test measures what it was designed to measure—what is called
the test’s validity—is assessed by comparing test scores with independent measures
Infant “Intelligence” 133
I NT E R I M S U M M A RY 5.3Mental Representation in Infancy
Specific Areas of Cognitive Development
Categorization
■ Grouping separate things together according to some rule.
■ It facilitates the storage and retrieval of information.
■ Infants learn to apply their knowledge of attributes to other members of the same category (for example, that his/her dog barking applies to other dogs as well).
Memory
■ Infantile amnesia is not being able to remember much before the age of 3 or 4.
■ Short-term memory has been studied by habituating infants and testing them after-ward with the same stimulus.
■ Long-term memory has been studied by imposing a delay between habituation and a later test.
■ Infants’ ability to remember improves with age—infants habituate more quickly and effectively as they grow older.
■ Deferred imitation (showing babies a series of actions, then seeing whether they produce these actions later) is even more advanced.
Play
■ Play is fun and interactive but also involves mental work.
■ Play progresses from exploratory play (goal of extracting information about objects) in the first year to pretend or symbolic play (make-believe scenarios) in the second year.
■ Play normally occurs in the context of social interaction and in some cultures is predominantly a child’s activity, whereas in others parents play as partners.
validity The degree to which
a test measures what it was de-
signed to measure.
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134 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
of the same or similar things. With infants, however, there is no definitive or obvious
index of achievement with which to compare intelligence test performance. One way
to assess the validity of infant tests is to compare infants’ performance early in life
with their performance years later, when they grow up to be children or even as
adults. Logically, if infants who perform well on infant tests do well on IQ tests as
children or adults, then the infant tests must be telling us something about “intelli-
gence” in infancy. This is a particular type of validity, called predictive validity (the
ability of measurements to predict later outcomes, i.e., for infant tests of intelligence
to predict later IQ scores). When Bayley (1949) studied the same children over time,
she found essentially no relation between test performance in the first 3 to 4 years and
intelligence test performance of the same children at 18 years. Only after children
reached about 6 years of age or so did an association between childhood scores and
later adult scores emerge. The Bayley Scales are useful in detecting developmental
problems in infants; a very poor score on the Bayley may indicate serious develop-
mental delays. It is not, however, predictive of later intellectual functioning (Bornstein
& Colombo, 2010).
The absence of a connection between infant intelligence and child and adolescent
intelligence could be due to several different things. It could reflect a genuine dis-
continuity in intellectual development. Maybe being a smart baby has nothing to do
with being an intelligent first-grader. Or the absence of a link between infant test
performance and later test performance could reflect a problem with the instrument—
maybe the Bayley test is not a very good measure of the things that should predict
later intelligence. The Bayley Scales test babies’ sensory capacities, and motor
achievements, as well as responses that are influenced by the baby’s emotional state,
like orienting, reaching, and smiling. For an older child, very different items are used
in evaluating intelligence—skills related to language, reasoning, and memory. On
these grounds, the lack of predictive validity of the Bayley Scales to foretell later IQ
scores is not surprising.
Perhaps measures of infant mental ability that are more purely cognitive and do
not include motor or emotional components would make more appropriate tests and
have more predictive validity. What might show us how well a baby is thinking? One
way is to watch how he or she pays attention. Generally speaking, infants who process
information more efficiently acquire knowledge more quickly. We can measure the ef-
ficiency of an infant’s information processing with some of the tools described at the
beginning of this chapter: habituation and novelty responsiveness.
Just as students vary in their ability to concentrate, so infants vary in the ways they
perform on tests of habituation and novelty responsiveness. Studies find that those
who are more efficient (i.e., who pay more attention to novel stimuli and less to famil-
iar ones) also tend to explore their environment more competently and play in more
sophisticated ways—two other indicators of infant cognitive competence. Further-
more, infants who are expected to show lower intelligence later in life—those with
developmental disabilities such as Down syndrome—are poorer in managing atten-
tion when they are babies. Although infants’ scores on the Bayley do not predict later
intelligence, performance on tests of habituation and novelty responsiveness do. That
is, infants who show efficient information processing tend to perform better on tradi-
tional assessments of cognitive competence in later childhood (Bornstein & Colombo,
2010; Kavšek, 2004; Strid et al., 2006; Tasbihsazan, Nettelbeck, & Kirby, 2003; Tsao, Liu,
& Kuhl, 2004).
Both low- and high-risk preterm and low- and very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) in-
fants and children are at risk for impaired developmental outcomes in motor skills
and behavior as well as attention and cognition (Bhutta, Cleves, Casey, Cradock, &
Anand, 2002; Saigal, 2000; Salt & Redshaw, 2006; Taylor, Klein, & Hack, 2000; van de
predictive validity When
performance at one time relates
meaningfully to performance at
a later time.
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Weijer-Bergsma, Wijnroks, & Jongmans, 2008). For example, even low-risk preterms,
at 3 to 4 years of age, achieve lower results in an intelligence test, in a visual percep-
tion test, in a location memory test, and in a sustained-attention test (Caravale, Tozzi,
Albino, & Vicari, 2009). Longitudinal studies of VLBW children confirm that many
differences from normal birthweight children at all ages up to adulthood remain sta-
ble over time (Breslau, Paneth, & Lucia, 2004; Saigal et al., 2000; Taylor, Klein, Minich,
& Hack, 2000). However, differences and delays are not pervasive. Monset-Couchard,
de Bethmann, and Kastler (2002) found some “catch-up” on language skills among
VLBW children (we first encountered this developmental recovery phenomenon in
Chapter 4). This finding received further support from two studies, one demonstrat-
ing catch-up in vocabulary development between 3 and 8 years of age by Ment et al.
(2003) and the other in reading skills between 9 and 15 years of age by Samuelsson
and his colleagues (2006).
So, intelligence is neither innate nor fixed in early life. Certainly genes contrib-
ute to general mental development (Johnson, Bouchard, McGue, Segal, Tellegen, &
Keyes, 2007; Segal, McGuire, Havlena, Gill, & Hershberger, 2007), but experience
in the world is a major contributing factor to all psychological functions, including
intelligence, and to be inherited does not mean to be immutable or nonchangeable.
Longitudinal studies of intelligence show that individuals definitely change over
time. Even heritable traits depend on learning for their expression, and they are sub-
ject to environmental effects (Lerner, Fisher, & Gianinno, 2006). So, infant and child
learning are assisted and guided by others. This is the social context of mental devel-
opment in infancy (Bornstein, 1991; Bornstein & Bradley, 2003; Bronfenbrenner &
Morris, 1998; Rogoff, 2003).
Infant Mental Development in Social ContextIn cultural communities as far flung as Turkey, Guatemala, India, and the United
States, children participate actively in culturally organized activities; in this way, they
gain an understanding of the world they live in. As apprentices in daily living, infants
must learn to think, act, and interact with others in their culture to live successfully.
One way to think about how the environment influences child development is to
take an ecological perspective, which you read about in Chapter 2. As you recall, chil-
dren’s growth and development are influenced by some forces that are close at hand
(parents, extended family, peers); other forces that are somewhat removed (their neigh-
borhood, their parents’ workplaces); and still other forces that are quite removed, al-
though still influential (social class, culture). Closer influences are called proximal, and
more remote influences are called distal. Generally speaking, distal forces influence
child development through proximal forces.
We know, for example, that low socioeconomic status (a distal influence) is linked
to poor intellectual development in children (McLoyd, Aikens, & Burton, 2006). For
example, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which followed ap-
proximately 2,400 children born from 1955 to 1970 into adulthood, Sharkey (2009) dis-
covered that experiencing high neighborhood poverty throughout childhood (say,
experiencing a poverty rate of 25 percent compared to a rate of 5 percent) raised the
chances of a person’s downward mobility by 52 percent. Growing up poor by itself
isn’t all that influences the child’s IQ and life chances, though. In addition, fewer edu-
cated parents live in poor neighborhoods, and poorly educated parents typically pro-
vide their children with less verbal stimulation (Hoff, 2006) and fewer enriching life
experiences (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002). These are proximal influences. In addition,
other distal aspects of social life that are organized by geography exert coordinate in-
fluences. These include schools, government and electoral districts, and other local
institutions. Public schools are partially funded by residential districts, so the quality
Infant “Intelligence” 135
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136 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
of the educational opportunities afforded children depends directly on where they
live. Similarly, the quality of parks and recreation centers, the effectiveness of the po-
lice, as well as exposure to violence, gangs, toxic soil, and polluted air all depend on
one’s neighborhood.
Risks associated with social deprivation early in life can be offset by intervention, as
the long-term Carolina Abecedarian Project shows. Beginning in the 1970s, this project
was administered to a group of predominantly African American children who were
living with single mothers who had less than a high-school degree. The educational
intervention started by age 3 months, and children in the treatment group received
center-based child care for a full day, 5 days a week through kindergarten entry at age
5. Some services (nutritional supplements and medical care) were provided to the con-
trol group to ensure that those were not the factors accounting for different outcomes
between the two groups. Experimental evaluations have found positive and lasting
effects of this intervention on children’s IQ, reading, and math scores first detected at
18 months of age. Children who participated in the intervention were also less likely
to be retained in a grade or placed in special education, and they were more likely
to be enrolled in or have graduated from college, than children in the control group.
As young adults (age 21 years), treatment participants showed a reduction in teen-
aged pregnancy compared with controls. These findings suggest that sustained, high-
quality, center-based interventions starting in infancy and continuing at least to school
entry can produce long-term positive impacts (Campbell, Ramey, Pungello, Sparling,
& Miller-Johnson, 2002).
Different social risks in early life (such as being born into poverty, to a single teen-
age mother, being low birth weight, etc.) tend to go together and add to one another
to increase the long-term disadvantages (Burchinal, Roberts, Hooper, & Zeisel, 2000;
Burchinal, Roberts, Zeisel, Hennon, & Hooper, 2006; Gutman, Sameroff, & Eccles,
2002). This is called multiple risks. One of those risks is the air children breathe. As
noted in Chaper 3, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are released into the
air during incomplete combustion of fossil fuel, tobacco, and other organic material.
Perera and her colleagues (2008, 2009) noticed delayed motor development at 2 years
of age in a cohort of Chinese children exposed prenatally to PAHs from local coal-
fired plant emissions. The effects were not seen in a second cohort conceived after the
power plant had been shut. In a later study, they evaluated the relation between prena-
tal exposure to airborne PAHs and child intelligence. Children of nonsmoking African
or Dominican American women residing in New York City were monitored from in utero to 5 years of age, with determination of prenatal PAH exposure through personal
air monitoring by mothers during pregnancy and intelligence assessed at 5 years of
age. After adjustment for maternal intelligence, quality of the home environment, en-
vironmental tobacco smoke exposure, and other potentially confounding factors, high
prenatal PAH levels predicted lower childhood IQ scores. IQ scores of high-exposure
children were 4 points lower than those of less-exposed children. Environmental PAHs
at levels encountered in New York City air affect children’s IQ adversely.
Children reared in more advantaged homes show superior mental development
both because of genetic factors and environmental ones (Petrill et al., 2004). The influ-
ence of the family on infant cognitive development is not a one-way street, however.
Infant and caregiver jointly contribute to developing cognitive competence. Although
children learn from the experiences they have with their parents, the experiences that
parents provide their children are affected by children’s capabilities at various points
in their development. In other words, the infant’s cognitive development is a product
of the constant interplay between the child’s abilities and the environment, including
experiences that their caregivers provide.
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Parents influence their infants’ intellectual development in
many ways: via teaching skills, by being responsive to their
needs, and by providing books and toys. In infancy, the vast ma-
jority of experiences stem directly from interactions within the
family. Parents take principal responsibility for teaching their
infants: They engage infants in early games as well as in turn-
taking exchanges in play. As carpenters do in constructing a
building, parents sometimes use temporary aids—a process re-
ferred to as scaffolding—to help their child advance (Vygotsky,
1978). Later, as the edifice of intellect grows and is solidified, the
scaffold may be replaced or taken down (see Chapter 7).
Parents vary in the scaffolds they favor, and some scaffolding
strategies may be more effective than others, depending on the
nature and age of the child. Positive stimulation in the first
3 years (responsiveness, for example) is one kind of interaction
that supports later motor, cognitive, and social development
(Bradley, Corwyn, Burchinal, Pipes McAdoo, & Garcia Coll, 2001a,
b; Saltaris, Serbin, Stack, Karp, Schwartzman, & Ledingham,
2004). Joint attention occurs when a caregiver and a child are fo-
cused on the same object and promotes cognitive development;
joint attention has been linked to improved communication
skills in infants (Butterworth, 2001; Mundy & Sigman, 2006).
Responsiveness occurs when parents react appropriately, contin-
gently, and promptly in response to interactions that their in-
fants initiate; this is another effective scaffolding strategy that
has long-term positive outcomes for children’s cognitive and
language development (Bornstein, 2002; Bradley et al., 2001b;
Gros-Louis et al., 2006). For example, in their prospective study
of a cohort of low-income, predominantly Caucasian mothers
and their infants in Minneapolis, early care predicted reading
and math achievement as measured at age 16 (Sroufe, Egeland,
Carlson, & Collins, 2005). The material environment (toys and
books) that parents provide for their infants is another effective scaffolding tech-
nique (Bradley, et al., 2001a, b; Gottfried, Fleming, & Gottfried, 1998). Toys that pro-
vide challenges and rewards (i.e., toys that infants can use with some help at first,
but then by themselves) are ideal. Reading with children broadens their knowledge
as well as developing prereading skills (see Chapter 7). The number of books and
toys matters, but so does parental involvement with them. Generally, careful and
considered early childhood stimulation programs have lasting positive effects into
adult years (Reynolds, 2003).
What motivates infants’ parents to behave in the ways they do? Parental belief sys-
tems, called ethnotheories, help to determine how parents interact with their chil-
dren. As a result, different approaches to scaffolding are seen around the world. For
example, European American mothers tend to believe that physical development is
the result of maturation but that knowledge comes from interaction with the environ-
ment. Kenyan Gisuii mothers tend to believe that physical development depends on
interaction but that knowledge comes from observation. Not surprisingly, European
American mothers tend to encourage infant exploration more than Gusii mothers as
a way of developing their babies’ cognitive skills, but Gisuii mothers deliberately en-
courage physical development more than their European American counterparts. (For
a summary of this section, see “Interim Summary 5.4: Infant ‘Intelligence.’”)
Infant “Intelligence” 137
scaffolding Providing learning
opportunities, materials, hints,
and clues when a child has diffi-
culty with a task.
ethnotheories Parents’
belief systems that motivate them
to behave in the ways they do.
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Parents have important roles to play in their infants’ learning about the world, as this dad shows in demonstrating for his 10-month-old girl how a new toy works.
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138 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY
The word infant derives from the Latin in + fans, which translated literally means
“nonspeaker”; the word baby shares a Middle English root with “babble.” Beginning
to speak—and understand speech—is one of most impressive, and essentially human,
developments during infancy.
Language depends on perceptual, cognitive, and social development, and it in-
volves many overlapping levels of production and comprehension. Sounds must be
produced and perceived (phonology). The meaning of words (semantics) must be
learned. The grammar (syntax) of language defines the ways in which words and
phrases are arranged to ensure correct and meaningful communication.
Consider what the infant must do to understand his mother when she says, “Come-
herelovelyforadrinkofjuice.” The child must break up the sound stream into individ-
ual words, understand what each word means, and analyze the grammatical structure
linking the words to decipher the overall meaning. To complicate matters further, these
three types of decoding must take place as the mother is talking.
Scholars have disagreed over the relative contributions of biology and experience
to the acquisition of language. Some theoreticians have argued that language learning
is based solely on the child’s experiences. In the fourth century, Saint Augustine wrote
that children learn language by imitating their elders; in the twentieth century, B. F.
Skinner (1957) argued that children acquire language through experience (learning).
In contrast, other theorists have asserted that infants must come into the world with
an inborn ability to acquire language (Chomsky, 1965; Jakobson, 1968). The truth is
some combination of these two extremes. Language is too rich, unique, and complex
a system for infants to learn through imitation and/or reinforcement, just as it is too
rich, unique, and complex a system for infants simply to know without appropriate
experience. The acquisition of language, like other developments, reflects a complex
interaction between the child’s developing competencies (biology) and adult-child so-
cial communication (experience).
Language Norms and Methods of StudyFigure 5.3 depicts some milestones of language development in infancy. As you can
see, the first 2 years of life are a time of remarkable growth. In the first month of life,
infants coo and babble; by their 24th month, toddlers can speak grammatically correct
phonology Sounds in language
that are produced and perceived.
semantics The meaning of
words and sentences, or the con-
tent of speech.
syntax The rules that define the
ways in which words and phrases
are arranged to ensure correct
and meaningful communication.
Also called grammar.
I NT E R I M S U M M A RY 5.4Infant “Intelligence”
The Bayley Scales of Infant Development are used to assess infant motor, sensation, perception, cognition, memory, language, and social behavior:
■ The validity (the degree to which a test measures what it was designed to measure) of these tests is problematic since there’s no definitive external index of achievement with which to compare infant test performance.
■ Predictive validity (validity over time)—compares infants’ performance early in life with their performance years later as children or adults.
■ The Bayley is still useful in detecting developmental problems in infants but not predictive of later intellectual functioning.
■ Intelligence is not fixed in early life—genetics contribute but experience in the world or social context is a major contributing factor.
■ An infant’s cognitive development is always a product of the infant’s abilities and the environment and experiences provided by caregivers.
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sentences. In the first month, infants respond to the sound of the human voice; by their
24th month, toddlers comprehend the meaning of prepositions (e.g., to, in, of). To understand how language develops in infancy, we might simply observe, record,
and analyze what children seem to understand or say as they grow up. Recordings
capture and reveal that the infants’ early speech is more sophisticated than it sounds.
For example, when children start saying words, it seems like they do not make cer-
tain distinctions clearly; a child might seem to pronounce the /p/ (pronounced “pa”)
and /b/ (pronounced “ba”) at the beginnings of words in exactly the same way. How-
ever, close analyses of recordings of children’s attempts at /p/ and /b/ sounds reveal
that some children actually make the sounds differently—but not differently enough
for adults to hear clearly. One important implication of this finding is that children’s
learning certain distinctions between sounds cannot be due solely to adult reinforce-
ment, because adults are generally unable to hear children’s initial improvements. An-
other implication is that our naked ears may underestimate children’s abilities. This
echoes a theme that arises again and again in the study of language development (and
of cognitive development more generally): The roots of complex behaviors often exist
long before those behaviors are clear and blossoming, and many capacities that seem
to bloom overnight have in fact been developing for months.
Language Development in Infancy 139
Approximate range of age of onset (months)
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25
Vocalizes several syllables
Coos
Babbles
Repeats syllables (“ma-ma,” “da-da”)
Says first word
Says five or more words
Uses two words in combination
Uses first pronouns, speaks in phrases or sentences
Understands gestures and responds to “bye-bye”
Responds to human speech
Discriminates emotional tones in speech
Responds to simple commands
Understands a prohibition
Follows a simple question
Can find a named picture in a book (“dog”)
Imitates words
Understands prepositions (“in,” “under”)La
ng
uag
e p
rod
uct
ion
Lan
gu
age
com
pre
hen
sio
n
Milestones of Language Development in Infancy The top half of the graph shows development of language comprehension. Across infancy, babies develop from simply responding to voices to understanding sophisticated phrases. The bottom half of the graph shows development of language production. Across infancy, babies develop from making cooing and babbling sounds to speaking in phrases and short sentences. The length of each bar represents the range of ages by which most infants achieve each ability, which is a reflection of individual differences in language development. Source: Reprinted by permission of the publisher from A First Language: The Early Stages by Roger Brown, p. 57, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1973 by the President and Fel-lows of Harvard College.
FIGURE 5.3
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140 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
Another strategy for studying the development of language uses parents’ reports.
In fact, much of the classic information about language development comes from
parents’ diaries of their own children (e.g., Bloom, 1976; Dromi, 1987; Leopold, 1949;
Weir, 1962). As sources of information, diaries can be quite detailed, informative, and
thought provoking, although they may also be biased and describe unrepresentative
children (Bornstein, 2010). A variation of this method is the parent checklist, where
parents note which words their child understands or uses on preprinted lists (Fenson
et al., 1993; Maital et al., 2000).
Language Comprehension and ProductionWhen examining child language, we have to distinguish between comprehension and
production. If you play with a 1-year-old, you might notice that the child can follow
your instructions well but cannot tell you anything about the simple game you two
are playing. Comprehension is understanding language; production is speaking lan-
guage. Comprehension nearly always comes before production developmentally. In-
fants might begin understanding words at 9 months but not say any until 12 months.
On average, comprehension reaches a 50-word milestone at around 13 months, whereas
production doesn’t reach this point until 18 months (Benedict, 1979). Both comprehen-
sion and production are immature in young children and continue to develop at least
until early adolescence (see, e.g., Wassenberg, Hurks, Feron, Hendriksen, Meijs, Vles,
& Jolles, 2007, for comprehension, and Berman, 2004, for production).
Individual Variation in Language DevelopmentChildren of the same age vary dramatically on nearly every measure of language de-
velopment (Bates & Carnevale, 1993). One researcher (Brown, 1973) traced speech de-
velopment in three children—Adam, Eve, and Sarah—by indexing their verbal growth
in terms of their mean length of utterance, measured in the number of morphemes
(units of meaning, including spoken words, like play, and word parts, like the “ing” in
playing). Figure 5.4 shows that all three children achieved common goals and that their
growth rates were nearly equivalent. However, Eve began talking considerably earlier
than did Adam or Sarah. For example, Eve used an average of three morphemes in
an utterance at about 2 years of age, whereas Adam and Sarah did not do so until ap-
proximately 3 years of age—one-third of their lifetimes later.
At 13 months, some toddlers produce no words, others 27 (Tamis-LeMonda &
Bornstein, 1990, 1991). At 20 months, individual toddlers can range from 10 to 500
words in their productive vocabularies, and this is true across cultures (Bornstein et
al., 2004). Over the course of early childhood, moreover, there is a fair amount of con-
sistency within individual children: Infants who know more words at 1 year tend to
know more words at 2 years. What is more, children who know more words may be
at a long-term advantage. Knowing more words speeds learning to read, improves
reading comprehension, and spills over into written language skills; vocabulary size
at 2 years of age predicts linguistic and cognitive skills at 8 years (Marchman &
Fernald, 2008).
Number of words and mean length of utterance are measures of quantitative differ-
ences among children; children also differ from one another qualitatively. Some chil-
dren are referential; their vocabularies include a high proportion of nouns, and their
speech provides information and refers to things in the environment (“ball,” “kitty,”
“apple”). Other children are expressive; their early vocabularies have more verbs, and
they use speech to communicate feelings and desires (“carry me,” “hungry,” “Mommy
go”). One researcher video recorded two children at play with their mothers at home at
12, 15, and 18 months of age (Goldfield, 1985/1986). Johanna was a referential child. Of
comprehension Understanding
language.
production Speaking the
language.
morphemes Units of meaning in a language.
referential A linguistic style
hallmarked by vocabularies that
include a high proportion of
nouns and speech that provides
information and refers to things in
the environment.
expressive A linguistic style
hallmarked by early vocabularies
that have relatively more verbs
and speech that uses social rou-
tines to communicate feelings
and desires.
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Johanna’s first 50 words, 49 were names for things. In play, approximately half of her
attempts to engage her mother involved her giving or showing a toy, and reciprocally
Johanna’s mother consistently labeled toys for her. Caitlin was an expressive child.
Nearly two-thirds of Caitlin’s first 50 words consisted of social expressions, many of
them in phrases. For referential youngsters, the purposes of language are to label, de-
scribe, and exchange information, whereas for expressive youngsters, language is to
note or confirm activity. Caitlin and Johanna are extremes, of course; most children are
both referential and expressive and their speech depends on the situation.
The Building Blocks of Language One of the principal tasks of the first 2½ years of life is for the infant to develop into a
conversational partner. Adult and infant alike are focused on this common goal, and
infants come very far very fast. In learning language, the child is neither ill equipped
nor, typically, alone. There are many elements of language that infants and their care-
givers utilize, such as infant-directed speech, turn-taking, and gestures.
Infant-Directed Speech Think about the way you would speak to a baby: As we
noted in Chapter 4, your inflection, speed, and choice of words are no doubt different
from those you use in speaking to an adult. Although infants possess perceptual
abilities that help in language learning (see Chapter 4), parents repackage the
Age (months)
Mea
n u
tter
ance
len
gth
(in
mo
rph
emes
)
3.00
2.50
2.00
1.500
Eve
Adam
Sarah
16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50
3.50
4.00
4.50
5.00
5.50
Individual Differences in Language DevelopmentAlthough most children develop language abilities through a very similar sequence, there is a lot of individual variation in when the process begins and how fast the process occurs. For example, Eve was using four-morpheme utterances just after her second birthday, but Adam and Sarah did not do so until they were about 3½ years old.Source: Reprinted by permission of the publisher from A first language: The early stages by Roger Brown,
p. 57, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright ©1973 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College.
FIGURE 5.4
Language Development in Infancy 141
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142 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
language directed at infants to match infant capacities. This
synchrony is thought to facilitate language acquisition. As we
discussed earlier, mothers, fathers, caregivers, and even older
children adopt a special dialect when addressing infants, called
infant-directed speech. The special characteristics of infant-
directed speech include rhythm and tone (higher pitch, greater
range of frequencies, more varied and exaggerated intonation);
simplification (shorter utterances, slower tempo, longer pauses
between phrases); redundancy (more repetition); special forms
of words (like mama); and more limited content (restriction of
topics to the child’s world). Infant-directed speech may be
intuitive and not conscious (Papoušek & Papoušek, 2002), and
cross-cultural developmental study attests that infant-directed
speech is almost universal (Papoušek, Papoušek, & Bornstein,
1985). Even 2- to 3-year-olds engage in such systematic language
adjustments when speaking to their 1-year-old siblings as
opposed to their mothers (Dunn & Kendrick, 1982). And deaf
mothers modify their sign language very much the way hearing
mothers use infant-directed speech (Erting, Thumann-Prezioso,
& Sonnenstrahl- Benedict, 2000).
Turn-Taking Turn-taking is fundamental to adult dialogue. It is
impolite to interrupt; rather, we wait our turn to speak. Setting
manners aside, it is likely that turn-taking evolved because the
human nervous system cannot simultaneously produce and
understand speech. Mothers and their infants take turns with
one another much more than speaking at the same time (Jasnow
& Feldstein, 1986). After a mother or a baby vocalizes, each will
next suppress vocalization to permit their partner to join the
con versation. When adults use conversational give-and-take
patterns, infants produce more speech-like than non-speech-
like sounds (Bloom, Russell, & Wassenburg, 1987). Infants
participating in such conversations also vocalize with sounds that are more like
real speech.
Gesture Gestures are a form of nonverbal communication and are often used to
support spoken language (Blake et al., 2003; Goldin-Meadow, 2006; Locke, 2001). By the
time infants are 9 months of age, parents already are labeling objects or events while
pointing or gazing at them. Mothers use their hands to attract and maintain infant
attention. For example, a mother might point and at the same time ask “What is that?”
Infants are more likely to look at objects previously pointed to and labeled than at
objects that were not labeled (Baldwin & Markman, 1989). That is, pointing and label-
ing increase infants’ attention to, and memory of, objects. At about 12 months, infants
themselves start to point, although the age varies considerably: Some begin by
9 months, whereas others don’t start until 19 months (Hoff, 2006). Infants whose moth-
ers respond to infants’ pointing by labeling (“Yes, that’s the moon.”) later become chil-
dren with larger referential vocabularies.
Why do people use infant-directed speech, turn-taking, and gesture with babies?
These strategies elicit the baby’s attention, change the baby’s state of arousal (by ex-
citing him or her), communicate emotion, and, of course, facilitate language compre-
hension. For example, infants respond more to their own mother’s voice when
mothers use infant-directed speech; infants also prefer to listen to infant-directed
speech than to adult- directed speech even when spoken by strangers (Kitamura et al.,
2002). Indeed, Zangl and Mills (2007) reported that infant-directed speech boosts neu-
Even the youngest babies—this boy is only 2 months old—are interested in interacting with others; this mother is using infant-directed speech (sometimes called “baby talk”) to keep their interaction going.
© L
aura
Dw
ight
infant-directed speech
A special speech register
reserved for babies that simplifies
normal adult-directed speech in
many ways.
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ral activity to unknown words in 6- and
13-month-olds. Certain features of moth-
ers’ speech are consistent across languages
such as American English, German, and
Mandarin Chinese. Mothers around the
world use rising pitch to engage infant at-
tention, falling pitch to soothe a distressed
infant, and an up-then-down pattern to
maintain infant attention (Papoušek &
Papoušek, 2002; Papousšek et al., 1985).
These adult modifications may make it
easier for the baby to acquire language.
For example, when presented with a se-
quence of syllables that contain some
speech sounds (e.g., in English, the sound
“bay” is a speech sound) and other sounds
that are not a part of speech (“gwu”), in-
fants discriminate speech sounds better in
infant-directed speech than in adult-
directed speech (Karzon, 1985).
Making and Understanding SoundsAt the most basic level, language and communication involve sounds. When we speak
we make sounds, and when we hear we listen to sounds.
Sound Perception As you read in Chapter 4, the auditory system is well devel-
oped before birth, and so newborns hear, orient to, and distinguish all sorts of
sounds from the moment they are born. But babies seem especially primed to per-
ceive and appreciate human speech. Consider the seemingly impossible task of
segmenting the speech stream—knowing
where one word ends and the next
begins—before knowing any words or
even what a word is. Imagine figuring out
that “Comeherelovelyforadrink ofjuice” is
“Come here, lovely, for a drink of juice,”
and not “Co mehere lo velyfor adrin kof
jui ce”). Moreover, infants have to do this
for different speakers and in different
contexts. One competency that has
evolved to address segmenting sounds
and recognizing speech is categorization.
Infants perceive categories of speech
sounds. Because sounds vary so much
from one language to another, many schol-
ars once thought that meaningful distinc-
tions among sounds must be shaped by
experience. It appears, however, that
many speech sounds are not experienced
as wholly different from one another or as
random; rather, many sounds fit into man-
ageable categories that infants recognize
Language Development in Infancy 143
© L
ouis
Qua
il/C
orbi
s
To overcome the loss of a communication channel, speech and hearing, families in the Deaf culture use visual and tactile means, like this dad signing to his infant son.
© In
spire
stoc
k/Ju
pite
rimag
es
Parents use many different strategies to get and hold their infant’s attention; gesturing to catch a baby’s attention and pointing to direct attention are common.
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144 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
from a very early age. The two sounds /b/ and /p/ are examples. Infants categorize dif-
ferent /b/s as similar and categorize different /p/s as similar, but distinguish /b/s from
/p/s. Categorization of speech sounds is important to language acquisition for many
reasons. For example, if infants heard each and every variant of /b/ as different, then
learning “ball,” “box,” “bat,” “bottle,” and so forth would be more difficult, not to
mention the challenges posed by the variations in /b/ produced by the same speaker at
different times or by different speakers (mother and father).
Sound Production Infants pass through stages in early verbal development: a
prelinguistic stage, a one-word stage, and a multiword stage.
Babies’ first means of vocal communication—crying and babbling—are prelinguis-
tic, but this hardly means that they are unimportant. Few adults can disregard a baby’s
cry. It compels us to respond (Bowlby, 1969), and the nearly universal response is to be
nurturing in some way (Bornstein et al., 1992). The infant’s cry is also a very revealing
vocalization. Babies’ cries are affected by many factors, including hunger and sleepi-
ness, nutritional deficiency, respiratory disorder, prematurity, genetic disorders such
as Down syndrome, and cocaine exposure during pregnancy. For example, parents
perceive the cries of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), compared to typi-
cally developing children and children with developmental delay, as less mature and
more negative (Esposito & Venuti, 2008).
If babies’ cries inform parents about their unhappy state, babbling is the first sig-
nificant nondistress communication. In babbling, there are frequent repetitions of the
same syllable sound or syllable—for example, ba-ba-ba-ba—and this practice perfects
the sounds, syllables, and sequences of syllables that later comprise full-blown speech.
Babbling is typically accompanied by excitement and motor activity and alternates
with attentive listening. Although babbling seems simple, there is more to it than first
meets the ear (Dromi, 2001). Babbling is significant because it comprises infants’ first
structured vocalizations, because it sounds like fun, and because it follows crying so
common in early infancy on the one hand, and the advent of intelligible words during
toddlerhood on the other. Even deaf infants “babble” using sounds as well as hand
signs (Petitto et al., 2001). We can conclude that having heard speech is not critical to
babbling. The similarities in manual signing and vocal babbling indicate that babbling
is an abstract language capacity of human beings related to expressive capacity.
Every child uses two sources of information when beginning to speak: the speech of
others and feedback regarding his or her own speech. As might be expected, deaf in-
fants’ vocal babbles develop later than those of hearing infants (Oller, 2000). Auditory
input is necessary for the normal and timely development of the ability to reproduce
the full range of adult-like syllables; indeed, it is crucial to children developing nor-
mal vocalizations in their native language. Babbling in Chinese differs from babbling
in French. Language experts and laypeople alike can identify the language of origin
in samples of 6- to 10-month-olds’ babbling, even though the infants will not be pro-
ducing their native languages for quite a while (Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand,
1984). Thus, the prelinguistic speech of infants as young as 8 months of age is influ-
enced by the language they hear. In sum, infants’ very earliest sensitivities to sound
and their earliest vocal expressions provide evidence of strong biological influences on
language development. Very soon, however, both perception and production of sound
are shaped by the linguistic experiences provided by parents and cultures.
How Infants Learn WordsRecall the “Comeherelovelyforadrinkofjuice” problem. To understand this simple
statement, even after breaking it down into separate units correctly, the child (lovely)
must determine which unit refers to him- or herself, which to objects (juice) in the
environment, which to an action (come), and so forth. After all, connections between
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word sounds and word meanings are arbi-
trary, so the decoding task is challenging.
Once the baby speaks his or her first word
around 12 months on average, the baby uses
the word for all kinds of things. A holo-
phrase is a single word that stands in for a
phrase and has different meanings depend-
ing on the context—for example, “bear” can
mean “that is a bear,” “the bear fell,” “I want
my bear,” or “my bear drinks milk.”
After the child had attained one-word
speech, word learning proceeds rapidly. The
average 3-year-old possesses an estimated vo-
cabulary of 3,000 words. Therefore, between
approximately 12 and 36 months, the child
acquires four new words per day on aver-
age (MacWhinney & Bornstein, 2003). Word
learning is also developmentally important:
Vocabulary is a key marker of children’s de-
velopment; vocabulary is a prominent com-
ponent of child language that parents hear,
attend to, and make judgments on; and size
of vocabulary is an indicator of intelligence
(Neisser et al., 1996). Thus, infants cry, bab-
ble, and gesture to communicate effectively, but these methods of communication are
limited. A major step in language development is when infants begin learning the con-
nections between sounds and meanings of their languages.
To what do children’s first words refer? One would think that children’s first words
might be those that they hear most often. But this is not altogether true—or at least
the story is not this simple. The two most frequent English words said to infants are
you and the, which are rarely among the first 50 words children produce. So word fre-
quency is not predictive of early vocabularies, although all other factors being equal,
frequency matters; American children learn cat before cap because they hear one much
more frequently than the other. What about the grammatical class of early words?
Nouns refer to concrete objects, verbs to actions, and adjectives to properties. Perhaps
because notions like “dog” are easier to grasp than notions like “give” or “round,”
children around the world learn nouns earlier on than verbs or adjectives (Bornstein
et al., 2004). One way word learning occurs is through induction, or using examples
to draw conclusions about new cases. Suppose a child sees a cup referred to as “cup.”
For the child to recognize that the same word refers to other cups requires an induc-
tion using a learned example to make inferences about novel objects. This is not as
simple as it sounds, and there are several problems to solve.
First, there is what we might call the immediate reference problem: Mommy is hold-
ing a mug of coffee and saying the word “cup.” But what does the sound “cup” refer
to? Sometimes the speaker will be pointing to an object when labeling it, but even in
these seemingly clear cases there are many logical possibilities. The word might refer
to the mug or its handle or the coffee in the mug or the act of drinking or that it is not
appropriate for babies your age, or any of an infinite number of conceivable meanings.
How do infants get it right?
Second is the extension problem: Once the infant has guessed what “cup” refers to,
the child extends this word to other objects belonging to the same category unless the
word is a proper name. (Having learned bird, a child will spontaneously use the same
word for other members of the same object kind, but won’t extend Joan to all girls.)
holophrase A single word that
stands in for a phrase and has
different meanings depending on
the context.
induction The process of using
a limited set of examples to draw
conclusions that permit infer-
ences about new cases.
Language Development in Infancy 145
© P
ete
Bar
rett
/Bra
nd X
Pic
ture
s/Ju
pite
rimag
es
Being responsive to an infant, as this mother shows, is not only a major way of interacting, but is one way that parents show infants that infants can influence their environment.
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146 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
fast mapping A phenomenon
that refers to how easily children
pick up words they have heard
only a few times.
whole object assumption A
concept that refers to children’s be-
lief that a novel label refers to the
“whole object” and not to its parts,
substance, or other properties.
mutual exclusivity A concept
that refers to an infant’s assump-
tion that any given object has
only one name.
socioeconomic status (SES) The education, occupa-
tion, and income of householders.
grammar See syntax.
But what makes a cup a “cup”? Its shape? Color? Function? We cannot simply say that
cup designates things that are similar to the original cup; and without defining similar, we’re right back where we started. Children manage to figure out fairly quickly how to
extend the use of words correctly if adults use words carefully. Once adults consistently
name an object as few as nine times, children pick up that name for the object (Mark-
man, 1999; Schafer & Plunkett, 1998; Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1994). That
is, they map the sound onto the object, a phenomenon aptly called fast mapping.
Children must have some rules to help them in their guesses about word meanings
(Markman, 1999). An example is the whole object assumption. When an adult points
to a novel object and labels it, the child is believed to initially think the novel label
refers to the whole object and not to its parts, substance, or other properties (although
it could very well refer to these other things). Another rule is mutual exclusivity: The
child assumes that any given object has only one name.
Children vary dramatically in their early vocabularies. In the fourth century,
Emperor Constantine wrote that infants could not speak well or form words because
their teeth had not yet erupted—which, if correct, should lead to earlier language de-
velopment among infants with the fastest dental growth; this turns out not to be true,
though. Most subsequent accounts have focused on differences in children’s experi-
ence, primarily in the speech children hear from their parents. Parents who are lower
in socioeconomic status (SES) talk substantially less to their children than more
affluent parents, and as a consequence, infants from lower SES homes speak later and
less than infants from higher SES homes. Hart and Risley (1995) estimated that chil-
dren from high SES families have been exposed to around 44 million utterances by the
age of 4 years, compared to 12 million utterances for low SES children (Huttenlocher,
Vasilyeva, Cymerman, & Levine, 2002). But there is also a great deal of variation that
SES does not account for. Even among mothers from the same SES group, some talk
to their babies during as little as 3 percent of a typical home observation and others
during as much as 97 percent (Bornstein & Ruddy, 1984). When both language amount
(how much the parent talks) and verbal responsiveness (whether the parent’s speech
is responsive to the infant) are considered, verbal responsiveness is found to contrib-
ute more to children’s emerging language than amount of speech (Bornstein, Tamis-
LeMonda, & Haynes, 1999; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 2002). Moreover, children
with verbally responsive mothers combine words into simple sentences sooner in de-
velopment than do children with less verbally responsive mothers. When mothers
teach infants a name for a novel toy, they tend to move the toy in synchrony with their
labeling, which helps infants make the association (Gogate, Bahrick, & Watson, 2000).
Thus, maternal verbal responsiveness facilitates the growth of infant language skills.
Indeed, Connor, Morrison, and Katch (2004) estimated that the family environment is
the major source of preparation for children’s literacy skills at school entry.
Is language development biologically programmed in our genes or determined by
the environment? You probably know the answer to this: Language competence is, as
you likely guessed, the product of genes and experience (Pruden et al., 2006; Waxman
& Lidz, 2006). One-year-old adopted children are like their biological and adoptive
parents in their language abilities, indicating genetic and environmental influences on
language development (Hardy-Brown & Plomin, 1985).
How Infants Learn GrammarGrammar (or syntax) refers to the rules for combining words into meaningful and in-
terpretable communications, and grammatical development is underway by just about
the beginning of the child’s second year (Bates, Devescovi, & Wulfeck, 2001). The
speed with which children achieve grammatical competence is particularly remark-
able in that children are able to detect syntactic rules and regularities as to their native
languages even though these vary enormously across languages. In English, for
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example, subjects usually precede verbs, which in turn usually precede objects. Thus,
when you hear “Larry, Marc, Deborah, and Karen wrote this book,” you know the
book was written by Larry, Marc, Deborah, and Karen. As English speakers, we are so
accustomed to this word order that it seems natural, even logical. But a great many
languages don’t work this way. For example, in Welsh, the verb usually comes first. In
Turkish and Japanese, many sentences place the verb last, but subjects and objects do
not have a fixed order. Given that these rules vary across languages, one would think
that they must be learned.
As to children’s acquisition of syntax, Skinner (1957) argued that children learn
grammatical rules by imitation and reinforcement. According to this way of thinking,
children learn transitional probabilities among words, or which word is likely to come
after which other word. “The dog ate my homework” is English, but “Homework my
dog the ate” is not. According to this view, adults produce grammatical statements
for children to imitate, and they also systematically reward children’s grammatically
correct statements.
However, Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that Skinner’s account of grammatical
development, with its emphasis on learned transitional probabilities, is far too sim-
ple. The grammatically correct use and meaning of an initial word in a sentence just
as often depends on the end of the sentence (i.e., on an overall sentence plan) as it
does on the next word. For example, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a
grammatical sentence, although the transitional probabilities in the word string are
nonsensically low. Thus, transitional probabilities cannot serve as a principle of the
child’s grammatical development.
Second, Skinner’s notion of reinforcement requires parents to consistently reward chil-
dren for producing grammatical utterances (and not for ungrammatical ones). In practice,
though, parents do not do this; in fact, parents are much more likely to correct young
children’s factual errors than their grammar. If a child who is eating an apple says, “Me
eat banana,” parents are more likely to say, “No, that is an apple” than “No, say ‘I am eat-
ing a banana’.” Thus, parents do not directly teach children grammar the way school-
teachers do. (Also, children resist explicit correction of grammar; a child saying “Me eat
banana” will not generally switch to “I am eating a banana” upon being corrected.)
Chomsky argued that a number of aspects of syntax are innate, built into every in-
fant’s brain in what he called universal grammar. Universal grammar accounts for the
fact that, although children’s language environments differ, children’s syntactic out-
comes are strikingly similar. Variation in the vocabulary size of English-learning chil-
dren can be traced to environmental factors such as parents’ verbal responsiveness, but
variation in grammar among children learning the same language is miminal; poor,
middle-class, and well-to-do U.S. children use the subject-verb-object syntax of Ameri-
can English when they speak, even if the numbers of nouns, verbs, and adjectives in
their vocabularies differ dramatically. Chomsky likened learning language to the growth
of an organ like the heart: As long as certain very basic preconditions are met, it (whether
language or the heart) will develop in all children. The claim is not that language itself is
innate (if it were, why would children in Boston learn the syntax of English and children
in Berlin the syntax of German?). Rather, the claim is that children have innate abilities
that facilitate grammatical development. The cross-language evidence suggests that,
when children everywhere start to put two words together, they try to convey the same
basic set of meanings, like possession and location, and as they progress from there the
rate of grammatical errors is surprisingly small (Bates et al., 2001).
Can biological structures that support language development be identified in the
brain? At present it is not possible to give a complete answer to this question. We
can say that no special area of brain tissue is wholly dedicated to language; however,
certain structures in the brain are involved in particular aspects of language process-
ing. It is well known that the left hemisphere of the brain is generally concerned with
universal grammar
Chomsky’s term for aspects of
syntax that are thought to be in-
nate and built into every
infant’s brain.
Language Development in Infancy 147
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148 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
language processing. For example, injury to Broca’s area (in the left frontal lobe)
tends to cause problems in producing fluent speech and in comprehending syntactic
structure; injury to Wernicke’s area (in the left temporal lobe) tends to cause poor
comprehension and fluent, but relatively meaningless speech (Sakai, 2005). (See Fig-
ure 4.4 for reference.)
When does brain lateralization begin in childhood? Mills, Prat, Zangl, Stager,
Neville, and Werker (2004) examined auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in re-
sponse to words whose meanings infants knew and compared them with ERPs to
words infants did not. From 14 to 20 months, ERP amplitude differences between
known and unknown words could be observed over both the left and right hemi-
spheres; by 20 months, the difference was limited to the left hemisphere, showing that
word understanding is lateralized before children reach their second birthday.
I NT E R I M S U M M A RY 5.5Language Development in Infancy
Language depends on perceptual, cognitive, and social development.
The acquisition of language reflects a complex interaction between the child’s developing competencies (biology) and the larger context of adult-infant social communication (experience).
Children of the same age vary dramatically on nearly every measure of language development, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Infant-Directed Speech
Making and Understanding Sounds
How Infants Learn Words
How Infants Learn Grammar
■ Sounds must be produced and perceived (phonology).
■ The meaning of words (semantics) must be learned.
■ The grammar (syntax) of the language defines the ways in which words and phrases are arranged to ensure correct communication.
■ Some children are referential (their vocabularies include a high proportion of nouns); some, expressive (their early language has more social routines).
■ Individuals use a special dialect when addressing infants.
■ Turn-taking is used in parent-child dialogue as is gesture.
■ Infants perceive categories of speech sounds.
■ Infants pass through prelinguistic, one-word, and multiword stages in early verbal development.
■ Babies’ first means of vocal communication are prelinguistic—crying and babbling.
■ Babies tend to use a single word (or holophrase) for many things when they first speak (around 12 months on average).
■ Between 13 and 36 months, infants acquire four new words a day on average.
■ Noam Chomsky argued that a number of aspects of syntax are innate, built into every infant’s brain in a universal grammar.
■ Children have a natural inclination to develop grammatically structured communication.
Broca’s area The region on the
left side of the brain dedicated to
language or speech production.
Wernicke’s area The region on
the left side of the brain dedicated
to language or speech compre-
hension.
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Was there once just one language? Would all children initially speak the same lan-
guage if they weren’t influenced by their experience to speak the specific language
they hear? The question of whether children possess a “natural language” has been
asked with surprising frequency in history and by a surprising group of individuals,
from pharaohs to phoneticians. James I of England (1566–1625), for example, posed
the question and thought of how to address it. Long interested in the Bible—his is
the King James version, of course—James sought to identify the original language of
Adam and Eve. He proposed to place two infants on an otherwise uninhabited island
in the care of a deaf-mute nurse. James reasoned that, if the two spontaneously devel-
oped speech, theirs would be the natural language of humankind. Although probably
within his power, King James never (to our knowledge) conducted his study as such
an experiment would be wholly unethical.
Natural experiments that approximate King James’s conditions suggest that chil-
dren develop their own grammar and vocabulary in the absence of formal linguistic
experience. For example, deaf infants who are of normal intelligence but whose par-
ents (for various reasons) have prohibited their learning sign language have essentially
no experience with any formal language, but their other life experiences are normal.
These children develop their own signs to refer to objects, people, and actions, and
they combine signs into phrases to express relations among words in ordered ways.
Their communication system is not only structured, it incorporates many properties
found in hearing children’s language. Clearly, in the absence of formal training and
imitation, children develop syntactic rules: They sign nouns before verbs, and verbs
before objects acted on.
Furthermore, the timing of deaf children’s invention of communication systems is
roughly the same as that of hearing children learning spoken languages—their first
“words” appear at around 12 months, and their first combinations of words appear
several months later. Even children in challenging circumstances reveal a natural in-
clination to develop grammatical communication. (For a summary of this section, see
“Interim Summary 5.5: Language Development in Infancy.”)
SUMMING UP AND LOOKING AHEAD
In the not too distant past, the notion that infants think would have been considered
laughable. Today, however, we know better thanks largely to the work of Piaget and
the decades of scientific study his work stimulated. Although Piaget’s timetable for
development in this period has been challenged, his general theory of the sequence
of cognitive development still stands: Children are active learners, who use their eyes
and ears, hands and mouth to investigate and make sense of their world. Infants seem
predisposed to form categories, build memories, play, and communicate with others.
They are drawn to novelty and are primed to develop language. Although maturation
plays a central role in this process, what infants discover, and the rate at which they
develop, are shaped by experience and context. Cognitive development is in large part
a social process, stimulated and influenced by the interactions of children with par-
ents, siblings, peers, and adults outside the family.
There is much cognitive development that takes place after infancy, which builds
on the foundation of language developed during these early years. As you will read
in Chapter 7, tremendous strides in language, information processing, mathematical
thinking, and social understanding take place between ages 3 and 5. But we are getting
ahead of ourselves. We still have one more broad domain of infancy to cover before
we leave babyhood behind. The development of the infant as a social being—and the
relationships he or she forms with others—is the subject of our next, and final, chapter
on the first 2 years after birth.
Summing Up and Looking Ahead 149
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Important Terms and Concepts
accommodation (p. 126)
adaptation (p. 126)
assimilation (p. 126)
Broca’s area (p. 148)
categorization (p. 129)
comprehension (p. 140)
deferred imitation (p. 131)
ethnotheories (p. 137)
exploratory play (p. 131)
expressive (p. 140)
fast mapping (p. 146)
grammar (p. 146)
habituation (p. 123)
holophrase (p. 145)
induction (p. 145)
infant-directed speech
(p. 142)
infantile amnesia (p. 130)
mental representation
(p. 127)
morphemes (p. 140)
mutual exclusivity (p. 146)
novelty responsiveness
(p. 124)
object permanence (p. 126)
phonology (p. 138)
predictive validity (p. 134)
production (p. 140)
referential (p. 140)
scaffolding (p. 137)
semantics (p. 138)
sensorimotor period (p. 126)
socioeconomic status (SES)
(p. 146)
symbolic play (p. 132)
syntax (p. 138)
universal grammar (p. 147)
validity (p. 133)
Wernicke’s area (p. 148)
whole object assumption
(p. 146)
150 part two Chapter 5 Cognitive Development in Infancy
■ The techniques and strategies that developmental scien-
tists use to confirm that infants have an active mental life
■ Piaget’s contribution to the study of infant cognition, in-
cluding his six stages of the sensorimotor period
■ The development of infants’ abilities of categorization,
memory, and play
■ Infant intelligence tests and their limitations
■ The processes of language development in infancy
HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Did You Get It?After reading this chapter, you should know:
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